The Money for Homeland Security

Published: January 16, 2006

To the Editor:

Frank Keating argues that small cities and rural communities are at greater risk of a terrorist attack than is generally assumed and that therefore the Department of Homeland Security should allocate much more money to them than what it is planning to do.

He points out, for example, that Las Vegas or the Hoover Dam would have ''enormous symbolic value'' to Al Qaeda.

The matter of symbolic value to Al Qaeda, however, is inseparable from that of how many American lives it can take in a single attack.

In that regard, we must assume that big cities like New York or Chicago are by far its most likely targets.

While the 1995 attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City by an American terrorist took 168 lives, the one by Al Qaeda on 9/11 in New York City took thousands.

It wasn't only the collapse of the World Trade Center that had symbolic value for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.